OPINION - Mewing will not make you more attractive to women, young men
At last, the thing that will save young men from suicide, feminism, masturbation and post-structuralism: mewing. Not meowing, though you wouldn’t be surprised if that were proposed as a solution These Days. No, mewing: the practice of putting your tongue flat to the roof of your mouth — keeping tension with the tip of your tongue against your teeth — in order to build up your facial muscles and fashion a square, chiselled jaw.
Yes, what young men need is the look of an Eagle comics hero, which should help them to become similarly capable, decisive, aggressive, merciless and, above all, sexually appealing Winners, like in the Good Old Days. And mewing is the way to get it.
Which may sound daft until you brace yourself for a dip into the seedy carnival sideshow that is TikTok (X is just a geek pit) and discover hundreds of videos with billions of views, espousing mewing’s benefits. It seems to stem from Incel sub-Reddits about Chads, boys with a certain symmetrical bone structure who girls — at the mercy of their own genetics too — supposedly choose over other, more deserving (ie better at gaming) males.
We are at the point at which playground gossip is given some credulity just because there’s a video about it
But a further venture into the internet’s parade of human oddities reveals an immense amount of mewing articles and “science” reports and even a Mewing Coach who promises to mentor your sorry slack-jawed ass into shape for a thousand bucks an hour. Believe it or not, mewing was invented by John Mew, a controversial orthodontist who, along with his son Mike, helped created the technique as part of “orthotropics” —basically a method of creating facial growth. Spoiler alert: it’s all bollocks. Holding your tongue to the roof of your mouth will not reshape your jaw and make you more attractive to women, and in fact is an unhelpful blocker to the main thing that will: talking to them.
But this is where we are, at a point at which playground gossip on a level of “you can get Aids from toilet seats” is given some credulity simply because there’s a video about it with some graphics on. It’s all short cons and swindles, with kids as the hapless marks. “The difference between proper tongue posture and actively mewing,” declares one video, “is to actively swallow, swallow, swallow the saliva.” And that’s one of the sane ones.
This is a milieu where grifters like Andrew Tate thrive, with their patter about having the solution to all your problems, if you simply step this way, young man, and sign up to my new online course for only two thousand bucks an hour. Giving access to social media is like letting your child run away with the circus. They are living in a bewildering and frightening yet seductive world, run by shysters who want to turn them into workhouse donkeys.
The new Online Safety Bill is a cop-out, a few suggestions for the tech giants. Like passing a note through the Dog-Faced Boy’s baying crowd to request that his cigar-chomping owner gives him a bowl of water. Ban all social media for under-16s. End of.
But they won’t. Which means for us parents, similarly racking up screen times of five-plus hours a day, we have to wake up and recognise our main jobs today: bulls**t detectors.
To learn more, sign up to my new mentoring scheme, Bulls**t Detecting for Pros, for a mere six thousand bucks an hour; see my Rumble channel, Full of S**t, for details.
Eurovision tops the charts in the race to the bottom
I used to hate the Eurovision Song Contest, not simply because I was trying to be cool but because it was so very, very bad. Now, though, I love it and actually get the cans in and scare the children with my jeers, as if I’m watching the Euros final, not Ireland’s Bambie Thug. I thought this might be because I’ve not just given up on being cool but because it’s got better, but I suspect that actually the collective cultural taste of the planet has dipped so low that Eurovision is now genuinely the best thing on offer. As the restored Let It Be shows, The Beatles sat together in rooms making eye contact and sharing skills as a group, and generated song after genius song. Now, a producer in his room on a laptop WeTransfers a song to a model dressed as an erotic banana for vocals, before it hits number one for five minutes and becomes the soundtrack to a thousand mewing videos.
This leaves Eurovision as the best thing in music, a place where there is at least a competitive spectacle to go with the awfulness, putting it first in the race to the bottom. The Brits are a joyless pig farm. Here’s hoping Olly Alexander can win the only music prize that matters.
Martin Robinson is an Evening Standard columnist
